Faith Eliott – Loomis (Video Premiere)

Loomis is the latest single to be taken from Glasgow-based singer-songwriter Faith Eliott’s upcoming debut album Impossible Bodies, due for release on 19 April via OK Pal Records. A love song for an ancient sea sponge living on a dying coral reef, Loomis is an absolutely stunning lullaby-esque song that sucks you in from its opening of dreamy strings, wobbling saws and hypnagogic plucking.

"I feel like we have so much to learn from sea sponges," Eliott says. "It seems so common to see our innate and primal 'nature' as individualistic, defensive, and violent. Sea sponges, on the other hand, are one of the first examples of single cells teaming up and cooperating as a composite being. Many of them exhibit really beautiful instances of symbiosis. I think we would do well to keep in mind that sponges are potentially our oldest ancestor. It shows that we have it in our biology to help each other and work together, as much as we have it in us to be destructive.

"In this song I am addressing the sea sponge; the primordial, asymmetrical lump we all evolved from. I want to reassure it that once we all die out, the Earth will just just go ahead and change again, and that that is okay.

"Of course, climate change is very real and not at all okay. But sometimes feeling utterly overwhelmed by the horrors of reality distracts from what you can actually do to make the world better. Like being kind and gentle. Or in the case of the sea sponge, converting sunlight into nutrients in order to create a symbiosis with the photosynthesising algae that it hosts."

The Skinny are delighted to be premiering the dreamlike nautical beauty that is the music video for Loomis which you can watch in the YouTube player above (click here if it’s not displaying correctly). The video was filmed, edited and produced by Edinburgh-based filmmaker Mario Cruzado with projections from James Gloyn and costumes, props and direction from Eliott and Hailey Beavis.

Of the video, Eliott says: "Filmmaker Mario Cruzado and I courageously travelled back in time approximately 450 million years to the Ordovician period. There, we endeavoured to document the life forms we encountered. We were able to capture some invaluable footage of the curious behaviours of giant nautiloids, armoured crustaceans and anemones prowling the lucid seas."

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Loomis is out now; Impossible Bodies is released on 19 Apr via OK Pal Records

Faith Eliott plays Bannermans, Edinburgh, 16 Mar; St Vincent’s Chapel, Edinburgh, 16 Apr; Doune the Rabbit Hole, Port of Menteith, 20 Jul

faitheliott.com